Kipward which had cost me more than one anxious
journey to London. Would Stephen approve of my
boots, I wondered, staring out of the window at the
reflective monochrome of flooded meadows and the
brown gloom of woodlands in the lowering dusk of a
heavily clouded December afternoon.
Whatever he might think of my boots, there was no
doubt that he approved of my arrival when the fussy
little train stopped for the last time and I found him
waiting for me on the platform. I allowed him to lug
my bag out of the station, and soon he had got it
stowed away in the old yellow-wheeled buggy, had
flicked his father's favourite hunter into a trot ("a
nailing good jumper, but as slow as a hearse"), and
was telling me all about the clinking hunt they'd had
the day before, and how he'd enjoyed my account of
the Potford gallop. "You've got a regular gift for
writing, you funny old cock! You might make a
mint of money if you wrote for Horse and Hound or The
Field\" he exclaimed, and we agreed that I couldn't
write worse than the man in the Southern Daily, whose
"Reynard then worked his way across the country"
etc. afterwards became one of our stock jokes.
In describing my friendship with Stephen I am
faced by a difficulty which usually arises when one
attempts to reproduce the conversational oddities
of people who are on easy terms. We adopted and
matured a specialized jargon drawn almost ex-
clusively from the characters in the novels of Surtees;
since we knew these almost by heart, they provided
-as with something like a dialect of our own, and in
our care-free moments we exchanged remarks in the
mid-Victorian language of such character-parts as
Mr, Romford, Major Yammerton, and Sir Moses
Mamchan.ce, while MX. Jorrocks was an all-pervading